Hal
HAL SAID, FASTENING THE GOLD BAR TO THE COLLAR OF HIS SHIRT: —Nothing can hurt you now, dear . . .
He looked at his face in the mirror of the latrine. It was that same latrine in which he’d scrubbed toilet seats with Bon Ami for Saturday morning inspections. Last night he’d clipped the officer candidate badge from the pocket of his blouse. Now he was a second lieutenant in the Army of the United States. Perhaps this was the moment in which he was to come into his kingdom.
Hal thought that something had been omitted from his nature —some gland, some gonad, some force possessed by all the other men and women in the world. He knew it when his Viennese mother used to look at him by candlelight as she played Der Rosenkavalier waltzes on her piano in Greenwich Village. He knew it in his first scrap at Public School 13. He knew it in the Bayonne office of the Standard Oil Company.
Hal’s secret was a great emptiness within himself. He believed in nothing, often doubting his own existence and that of the material world about him. Some evenings when he was drunk in Greenwich Village, he’d stretch out his hands and say:
—Yes? That’s what all the girls tell me down at the office. . . .
Everybody was his friend. He was six two and had such magic of face and body that people looked at him when he came into rooms. He was held to be a wit because the vacuum inside him made him envelop like a bell jar every personality he met. Everyone said he was a genius, but Hal thought himself a zombi, one of the undead. Consequently everything in life was quite clear to him, as it is to one who lives for ninety years and then allows himself to be buried alive because he can’t put up with human beings any longer.
His commission had put him into the first stable spot of his life. It was the first time that he knew exactly where he stood. His pinning the gold bar to his collar had the same effect as if the president of the United States had chopped off his head, pickled it, and set it for display inside a gilt frame, as whiskys are advertised in The New Yorker magazine. For Hal it was a relief to have the horizons of his mind planed down, with certain conventional fences erected in their stead. He would be saluted by all enlisted men, and henceforth his mind must move along neat little tracks, greased by order of the secretary of war. It was the first breather Hal had ever had from coping with things.
—And you’ll be overseas soon, dear, he said to himself, turning away from the mirror. Perhaps you never belonged in America at all.
He walked out of the latrine and into the squad room. They were busy putting straight their bars, because after the general had handed you your commission at graduation, you put on your insignia any old way and rushed out to give one dollar to the first officer candidate who saluted you.
Hal had been popular at OCS. He’d agreed with everyone and understood them all. For one week he’d been acting company commander. On week ends, like the rest of them, he’d tear into Washington, take a room at the Statler, and get drunk with all the cliques. There was the Brilliant Crowd, the Swishy Crowd, the Empire Builders, and the Drugstore Cowboys. Hal knew them all, even those fringers who didn’t belong to cliques.
And now he was leaving them with the same smiling casualness as he’d come into the company twelve weeks ago. He’d always had this sense of isolation: he loved his Viennese mother when he was with her in the Bayonne apartment; he loved people when he was drinking with them. But when he was alone, it was as though all his life with others had never been. They were all shadows thrown on the wall of his brain. Hal was just a raw piece of sensitized paper. And no one would ever develop the pictures he’d taken. . . .
—Hal, said a new second lieutenant, grabbing his hand. Look me up in New York. And stay out of the Astor Bar, hear?
—They’re making Hal security officer at Fort Hamilton, another said. Then the Germans will never know what is sailing out of the harbor. . . .
They all milled around from their packing and looked at him with sentimental old-school eyes. Their new bars glistened like jewels on paupers. Hal knew that it would be months, if ever, before their uniforms, for which the people of the United States had given them each two hundred and fifty dollars, would look natural. At heart they were all still corporals or sergeants.
Hal towered over them all as he shook hands. He’d been close to every one of them. Each had expressed his personality in Hal’s company with the license of a spinster before a mirror. But not one had ever made to him the gesture of surrender. They were simply happy that he’d understood them and accepted them. They had loved him for the reflection he gave them back of themselves, for he knew how to make people shine in their own eyes.
He went out of the barracks and took the bus for Washington. The undergraduates were getting out of their classes, and his arm got stiff from the unaccustomed saluting he had to return rather than initiate. And the undergraduates saluted him in tribute to the commission that they themselves were still sweating out. They’d be gigged if they didn’t salute. The Adjutant General’s School was almost like the movies in its conception of the Army of the United States. Its new second lieutenants were the cream of something or other. Hal smiled to himself as he thought that he was the most pasteurized of them all.
He got on the long bus, pulling in his legs, which never fitted anywhere. He leaned back in a dreamy way, deceptive of relaxation. Two WAC’s across the aisle nudged one another. Hal knew. They were telling each other he looked like Gary Cooper. The bus began to groan off, and he slitted his eyes, feigning sleep.
—Gee, sir, congratulations, you graduated today.
It was a little officer candidate behind him, from class twenty-one. All the way into Washington he talked Hal’s ear off, of how in another month he too would be a second lieutenant. At the Adjutant General’s School there was a relation between students and already commissioned officers that tickled Hal. The barrier between them wasn’t quite that of officers and enlisted men, but the incestuous byplay between the upper and lower forms of a large private school. The officers called the enlisted men gentlemen with the sniggering deference of a dowager toward a pantrymaid who is about to come into a fortune. But Hal said nothing of this. He wished the little man well and got out of the bus.
It was the Washington of June, 1943. There was a hysteria here that ran underground from the Pentagon to the Statler, Mayflower, and Willard hotels. The sun was as tyrannical as it can be only in Washington, but everything was air-conditioned. Everybody drank a good deal and everybody talked about bureaucracy and the windup of the Tunisian campaign. Brigadier generals flounced along the street like democratic abbesses. All the enlisted men who weren’t sweating out a commission at Fort Belvoir or Fort Washington wore the shoulder patch of the Washington monument. Near the navy buildings soft-cheeked Waves strolled in an innocent pride. WAC’s tore efficiently through the streets. Thousands of sailors and marines were on the loose with cameras strapped to their shoulders. Civilians groaned about the housing problem, but everybody beamed at everybody else, particularly on Pennsylvania Avenue after dark. To Hal it seemed as though America had grown sharp and young again after the years 1929–1939. They all thought of themselves as part of an adventure, so for the first time in a decade they were united, proud, and rather gay. Washington was a garden party listening to communiqués from Europe. Then the shining frocks and the seersucker suits would have another drink, and the talk would bubble up again. There was plenty of shrimp at O’Donnell’s Sea Grill. The only people who looked at all uneasy were a few British and French officers who’d come over for infantry training at Fort Benning. For this was Washington of June, 1943.
Walking through Washington steeped Hal in a Schwärmerei he’d inherited from his Viennese mother, who’d wept all through his childhood in Greenwich Village. Last week they’d had words, so she hadn’t come to his graduation from OCS. Hal thought himself wiser than she. Every time she tried to put the silver cord around him, he’d cut it with a tender rueful smile. Their relation hurt them both. But Hal had read too much at CCNY
and had had one bout too many with smawt young psychiatrists. Their fingers were all over his soul, the way the flesh of a salmon is maculate from the angler’s fingers. So in Schwärmerei Hal floated through the world as today he walked through the streets of Washington. He smiled and was oh so gentle with all. And he read and reread the New Testament and Harry Emerson Fosdick and Monsignor Sheen and Rabindranath Tagore and Omar Khayyam and Elsie Robinson and Clare Boothe Luce. And this was why Hal said, as people hung over him at midnight:
—You must understand yourself, kid. Then you’ll get to a point where you’re as solid and limpid as good hot jazz in a dive at four o’clock in the morning.
—But you help us understand ourselves, they said, putting a careless arm round Hal’s shoulders. We talk to you, and everything seems clearer. Then we go away, and everything is as snafu as it ever was. Tell us your secret.
—They always ask me for my cake recipe down at the office, Hal said.
Confronted with the peripheries of his own personality, he became frightened. It was like walking down a long corridor, every door of which bore his name. Yet he was an alien in all those rooms. He could open door after door, but in each he was as ill at ease as he’d been in the last. Thus he often wondered what it was he had, that everyone came and talked to him and assured him of a wisdom that he never sensed. To himself he was a magnificent and brilliant zero. Yet he’d have had everything if God had given him a single creative impulse. Instead he’d been put on earth simply as five hair-trigger senses in a gorgeous shell of flesh. He was incapable of taking anything and molding something out of it. . . .
Hal entered the lobby of the Hotel Statler. It was twenty degrees cooler than the streets outside. A rush of sweat came under his gabardine shirt stretched taut over his wide tanned back. He grabbed off his cap, feeling faint and giddy in the icy damp air. He tucked his cap under his belt; the gold bar on it swung like a neon firefly from the lope of his long legs and his tight neat hips. As usual people lounging in chairs gave him the lookover and looked once again. A naval flier winked at him. And a wilted mother swooning in the midst of two quarrelsome little girls fanned herself harder as Hal passed. He went into the men’s bar and drank three rum cokes with the quick precision that had made him famous in the bars of the Village.
It wasn’t possible for Hal to be five minutes in a bar without being invited to join someone. He saw the usual overtures beginning from a table across the room, where sat a catlike man in an open shirt, looking like a State Department secretary on his afternoon off. So Hal settled for his drinks and went out into the elevator. He’d been one of the great drinkers of the Village, even when he was at CCNY. Alcohol made him colder and more compassionate and more penetrating than ever. When he arrived at the state which in others would be drunkenness, the last veil of illusion was torn from him. At such moments he saw nothing to life but a grisly round of eating and sleeping and talking to others until your heart stopped beating. His huge physical charm heightened under alcohol. He’d hold himself up like a locket before the dazzled eyes of whomever he was with. And then he’d excuse himself and go away to sleep. He never had hangovers because the alcohol never gave him any plus for which to exact a corresponding minus.
In the elevator Hal lit a cigarette and looked at the operator, waiting for him to speak first. The boy’s head rose out of the high collar of his Statler livery.
—Today you’re a new lootenant, ain’t ya? the boy said with 4-F wistfulness.
—Mother, mother, pin a rose on me, Hal said. For today I yam a maaan.
The boy laughed and slid open the door. Hal walked along the corridor. He passed himself in mirrors. He knocked at the door of 2023 and leaned his head against the jamb. The door opened.
—Ho-ney! she said. Take off your rubbers and come into this house. . . . He’s in the shower . . .
Hal took her by the elbows and tried to hold her off from him and look into her face. Instead she edged across the barrier and kissed him, her breath sweet with rum. Her lips skidded across his mouth. Sometimes she even kissed him in the presence of her husband. It made Hal sick and sad because he knew she loved him and had flaunted the mistake of her marriage from the first night that Lyle had introduced them. She used to come down from New York every week end that Lyle was free from OCS. Then she would experiment in getting Hal drunk till she found that his essential chill became ice by midnight.
—First of all, she said after the kiss, you’re going to share our New York apartment. Lyle won’t hear of anything else.
He released himself softly and walked to the window. She poured him a drink and sat on the bed to watch him. From the shower came the hiss of the spray.
—Why don’t you act like a native of Oklahoma, Helen?
—Because if I did, I’d go around in Indian costume and sing songs by Charles Wakefield Cadman.
Helen was crisp by Nature and Helena Rubenstein. She worked at a large department store, drawing hard stylized mannequins for ads. She claimed to no illusions, but Hal believed that she was fuller of them than most New Yorkers. Actually she had a nature simple and passionate, secretly dreaming in terms of the Idylls of the King.
—Ho-ney, she said, you’re still yearning for the Blessed Virgin.
—Let me alone, Helen, and straighten up your own attic.
—Why do you pretend to be a saint? she said, kicking off a shoe. You’re a bitch on wheels.
—Let’s get away from personalities, he said. I’m sick of them. . . . Everybody’s playing on me like a harp. And you’re not happy till you’ve pulled off all my strings.
—All jazzed up, aren’t you? You’ve enough energy to put the lights on again all over the world.
A screaming sort of singing came from the bathroom, and they both knew that Lyle was toweling himself. Presently he came out in his shorts. He was a little fat, and hairless as an Eskimo. He talked constantly about the theater in a high strident voice and was miserable outside New York.
—He’s here he’s here he’s here he’s here, Lyle shrieked and swung Hal three times by the hips. Stand by the mirror, child. . . . Helen, I just see it, I visualize it. . . . Better than Danny Kaye. Put him on the stage in gold foil, and have Gertie Lawrence singing to him in a violet light.
—You’ve both been stabbed to death by New York, Hal said, walking again to the window.
—Listen to the likes of that! Lyle shrieked. He covers the water front and he’s eating in chophouses and he’s doing Pennsylvania Station at five in the morning and he’s biting the hand that feeds him. He has pernicious anemia every time he gets out of New York.
The old song and dance, Hal thought. They were all three like hamburg chopped fine from New York. They all professed to love her, yet New York had pressed them down with her rhinestone steam roller . . . too much speed, too much automat, too close proximity, too many manufactured values, and no humanity in the anthill. Every New Yorker a doll with flashing eyes and expensive gestures. They all drank too much and smoked too much, and no one really enjoyed himself in anything he did. They read the New Yorker and went to all the first nights. They had high blood pressure of the soul and petrification of the heart. Machines for sex and money and furs. That was all. Hal sat down on the chaise longue and put his hand to his head. The other, holding his glass, went slack.
—Oh that body, Helen said to her husband. The kind you cherish in settlement house boys.
She worked on the theory that to oxidize her desire for Hal at all times when they were together was the surest method not to give offense to her husband. Thus (she figured) no dam of Victorian inhibition would build up inside her and break, to everybody’s embarrassment.
—That body, Lyle said, should be up against a ballet bar every morning at ten o’clock.
—To hell with the New York stage, Hal said. I look enough like a chorus boy as it is. I don’t dare go to the beach at Fire Island.
—That’s his Li’l Abner pose, Lyle screeched and laughed his harpy whinn
y.
At moments Hal found a desert of horror in Lyle, shrieking for irrigation from the heavens. No rain ever fell on that parched face. Lyle’s eyes protruded when he talked. Nearly everything he yelled forth in his monologues had a quality of dry pumice in it —shrouds like the linen on night club tables, smiles like Italian waiters on roof terraces above Central Park. There was a thirst in Lyle madder than a morning after. The whore and the mystic were at odds in Lyle’s heart, and writing copy for perfumes hadn’t helped him any. Yet he came close to believing in anything that was smawt. Though sometimes, when the dawn came up over the subways, Lyle would be visited with an epileptic ague, and he’d babble about a little farm in Vermont.
—Hal, said Helen after a pause, is in the position of Jesus Christ attending Radio City Music Hall.
—The most tragic remark of the year, Hal said, and poured himself another drink.
They drank all afternoon and evening in that air-conditioned hotel room. Helen switched on the Philharmonic concert and lay back on the bed with her shoes off, one arm under her head, a glass in her hand, and stared at the ceiling. She said that the designs in Mozart’s music brought her back to sanity, yet there was a fever in her eyes as she pretended to listen to the Jupiter. Lyle talked over and through all music, shouting like the mistress of a ballet troupe counting out the time. He talked of the advertising business after the war, of how—now that he was commissioned— he was going to talk his way into army PRO and sit out the war in the Pentagon. The music made Hal as nervous too. He sat on the floor and wondered if the room would close in on him. When the sun set outside over Washington, they rang for lobster salad and sandwiches and melons. Then they continued to drink till midnight. Lyle passed out reminiscing of Maria Ouspenskaya and was laid on his bed. His face was as pasty and wrinkled as an old squaw’s.
Hal turned to go to his own room. By the door Helen caught him and reached up to his shoulders.
—You know we might be together tonight, she said.
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